Friday was interesting. I think there were like 7 people in our department who actually showed up, and 5 were on 2nd floor. There was this thing for Network and User Services where a bunch of schools get together. Don't know much about it other than a lot of people don't think to highly of it. Anyways, got stuff done but it was a pretty slow day otherwise. I think the biggest thing I did was get stats for faculty home directory usage together. Friday night I watched The Others. OK movie, but the ending sorta sucks and I think make the whole movie seems so boring once you've seen it. Saturday I slept in until around noon, and then for some reason decided to get motivated and pulled out the sawzall and took out one of the walls. Only took out one due to the fact that it was pretty much impossible to breathe down there (the filter on the fan after letting it run for a while is gray with drywall dust instead of blue) combined with I neglected to realize that the blade would be hot after cutting through metal and went to straighten it with my hand. I ended up finishing that computer (wiping and reinstalling Windows), which went pretty smooth. ME likes a lot of reboots though. I also managed to get my cell phone switched over into my name. A whole predicament there involved almost canceling and having to get new numbers. Apparently I'm approved for 10 cell lines though, which is just weird - nobody should ever need that many. Hopefully in a week or so I can invoke WLNP and transfer both lines to different accounts on a different provider though. After that was movie night with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl hosted by Nick. A bunch of people were there and it was a good time even though we didn't really get his surround sound working until afterwards (for some reason his dvd player was downconverting Dolby Digital to two channel but passing DTS through normal). Of course these get togethers end up with fun stuff and tonight we got a great quote from Tenley - "I bitch because I can." After that a few of us hung out and talked for a while. Nobodys's car got messed up either. Anyways the sawzall battery is dead and now charging, so I'm off to bed.

Wednesday was OK. Went to Eddington's for the second day in a row which was good. Spent most of the afternoon coding on the IncidentBase and catching up on feature requests. Hopefully those will all work well and not cause more problems. I did put together most of the hutch for my desk in the evening, but turns out you need a hammer for finishing it. You'd think with all the stuff I've done here so far I'd have one, but nope - most stuff can be pounded together with either a fist or a few good hits with a palm. :) I finished off the day by making a little RotK signup web page. If you don't know the address and want to come email me. And then there was restarting a web server again. The one last night was blackboard and well, it's blackboard... The second one was one we're trying to get rid of, and I think is pretty close. It looks like it's down to personal web pages though, but of course that's what some people wanted to visit so started bugging me about... Thursday was pretty ordinary. Not too much happened. After work watched One Hour Photo. That's a weird movie, and I don't think too well done. Apparently some people find the concept freaky, but although a guy getting obsessed like that probably doesn't happen, the people making extra copies of photos they like isn't exactly something that never happens. I put up my Christmas tree sorta. It probably needs to be evened out a bit more, and one of these days the fun chore of putting on the lights needs to happen, but at least it's assembled. Finishing off the evening with a little geeky reading on Dolby PL-II vs DTS NEO:6. Interesting discussion to read, especially as I sit here enjoying the fact that Harman decided to put Logic 7 in the HK stuff too since it blows them both away. :)

It's nice when you can sleep in as late as you want. I got up sometime in the afternoon and did nothing for a while. Eventually Nick and Dave came over and we watched 10 Things I Hate About You followed by Mickey Blue Eyes. Both are quite funny movies, although if they're gonna put them in 5.1, they should make use of the surround channels for some ambiance at least. Like walking through a crowded hallway with no sound behind you? At least go two channel and let some be simulated...

So everyone else starts posting more often then normal and I skip a few days. And I thought my break was sorta relaxed so far... :)

Wednesday was slow. All day whenever I looked at a clock I wondered how in the world it wasn't later. I did end up getting some random stuff that just hadn't gotten done out of the way though. Trimmed down the inbox a bit. Lunch was C1, which was good although we had a couple traitors in the group. It was Paul's first visit and since he's now talking about how good it is I guess that went well. Mike was working late attempting to get us to the point of having backups after about a week of no backups and having at least one flakey file server. Because of this, after work Nick dragged Mike and I out to Jake's for some good burgers. They went a little crazy on the cajon powder which lacked spice anyways but their sorta mustard dipping sauce had potential. I'll have to try something else next time. That evening I actually sat around and watched TV. Not sure what I think of this whole watching TV thing yet, but after analyzing the signal strengths and MPEG blocking and audio drops I decided that I have issues with multipath (yes, figuring that out was much more interesting than any of the shows on TV). I also found out that Target canceled my order along with everyone else's for the HDTV, which I was sorta expecting - oh well, it was worth a try. FedEx also tried to deliver my speakers. Sorta surprising given they were shipped late Monday, but as I've said before FedEx is by far my favorite shipping company for reasons like this. If only I had been around.

Thursday was Thanksgiving. Also known as the eat food and try not to go crazy day. I showed up at my parents house at 8 (I think that's the earliest I've gotten up in the morning since I moved). They were shocked that I got there on time, and nobody was ready. Eventually we got ready and started on our road trip. The begining of that was copying music from my laptop to my MP3 player and talking. The talking part is never my favorite so once the copying was done I tried to settle into my music. I listened to this year's Cities 97 Sampler and I like probably half of them. The other half I'm not so crazy about, but I think I could stand listening to at least a minute of pretty much all of them. We arrived and ended up doing the usual thanksgiving stuff with turkey and other food. After that I was introduced to this cool came called Quarto. As usual with probably every game I like, it's a strategy game. Basically you get 4 pieces with at least one matching attribute in a row. The twist is your opponent gives you your piece. My cousin and his wife also brought a tape of this awesome TV show called Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. It's originally what looks like a Chinese show but it's dubbed in English. And I can almost guarantee that nothing that's said in English is a true translation. Think every painful US challenge game taken ten times farther but they don't bother keeping score and just rank the most painful failures of the game. If you want to know what the new lines involve, I'll just say it's on SpikeTV and leave it at that - as their web page says, "they put the "FU" back in FUN." I did get dragged into some other games, but spent most of the rest of the night sorta napping while listening to music. Then there was another 2 hour car ride home which I got to mainly sleep through, followed by a drive back to my place. I was already short on sleep at this point, so the long day wasn't treating me very nice...

Friday I got up shortly after 10 since I had to be around for the previously mentioned FedEx delivery of 6 boxes. They showed up around 11 and due to it taking 3 loads on the dolly to get them into the garage the FedEx guy and I talked about how many idiots there are on the road. Apparently people can't understand why a delivery truck with the back open is stopped and not moving half the time so they stop behind rather than going around. Anyways, it didn't take me long to carry in and unpack some of those boxes. They were new speakers, which sound much better than the old ones. They also now are basically matched all the way around and I now have high-quality center and surround speakers. Due to the need to set sound levels and the previously mentioned multipath issues I actually made a trip out shopping. The SPL meter was easy to locate but as sorta expected the Radio Shack guy was pretty much clueless about multipath rejection on their yagi antennas. I picked up one that judging from the beams is one of the better ones they had. Since I don't have a cable run up to the attic yet I have it in my living room pointed out the front window for testing and aiming (hey, no furniture in there yet so I was using it as storage for boxes anyways). Of course the nice 4+ft tall boxes from the speakers make a great stand for the antennas so it goes through the window and not the wall. I'm not so sure about it's directionality since I can get a signal from St Cloud (northwest-312deg) with it pointing pretty much straight east (88deg). As for the SPL meter I popped in the DVE disc and calibrated reference to -5db on my receiver. These speakers are definitely more efficient, since on a test chapter after calibration it had no problem reaching 111db and the receiver claims to be able to put 15db more gain behind it no problem. While feeling the jet fly past is cool, it can't be all that great for the ears so movies will definitely not be that loud. The imaging is very good on these though. On both the DVE disc and a certain SACD I was again trying it could position stuff behind my head way too effectively (it's freaky to have it sound like something's falling or blowing up or even making a loud sudden noise right behind your head). I did some more evaluation of the DTV stuff, and most of them seem to be better. Still have issues on a couple, although I think it may be somewhat config so far. It'll be nice when stuff is actually HDTV, although hopefully they'll get better MPEG2 encoders. They also need to stop playing the "louder is better" game with audio. You can't use the MTS encoder and transmitter to limit the audio with soft distortion like on analog when you're passing it directly into an A/D converter. Especially if that's gonna be followed by a DD encoder to make the distortion sound even worse... Finished off the night by watching Blue Thunder. While an interesting idea and sorta cool to have helicopters and jets having combat over LA, don't bother with this movie... The video isn't that great, and the soundtrack is crap.

Anyways, since this is now a book, I'm gonna go get some sleep.

Started off the day by going to Salem Baptist again, and today Paul even joined us. The roads were rather interesting. After that my brother came over to watch the football game. He brought shovels along so when that was done we went out and cleared the snow off the driveway. It was nice that it wasn't colder since even though some spots had gotten packed down pretty well, it still didn't take too much work to get it all up. Then I watched T3 which was very cool from the effects aspect. It sounded like the big trucks were right there ripping apart the room. It could have probably had a better plot, but it did a good job of twisting around the story a bit. After that was Road to Perdition which was a good movie.

Nothing too interesting Thursday (at least that I remember - the Avalon stuff doesn't count since that's still no fun). Lunch was Eddington's though which is always a good selection. I don't get the people who only eat there in certain weather conditions - I say it doesn't matter. Friday I rebuilt a server. No, it wasn't Avalon, it was the paging server which actually isn't really doing anything yet. It needed an upgrade anyways so now maybe I'll get the new paging architecture in place. Friday night was decorate the lab night. Betsy started drawing funny versions of the 12 days of Christmas, and then they were projected, traced, painted and hung up on the walls. That was fun, although Dave and I more just sat around and hung out than actually helped. Saturday I got up semi-early so I could go buy stuff. Office Max had this nice oak "L" desk for $50 off and a free hutch to go with it, so I got that. I also bought a leather recliner and office chair since I figure I need that. Then there's a DVD/CD rack which will get assembled at some point. In the process of doing all this it was sorta snowing and I was driving all over the north end of the cities (multiple stores and my parents house) and probably had a bit too much fun on the roads. Spinning tires and sliding around corners usually should wait until later in the winter... Then I spent the rest of the afternoon organizing and cleaning the place so that there was seating room in the theater room. In the evening a bunch of Bethel people came over for movie night. We watched See No Evil, Hear No Evil followed by Stigmata. The first one a pure comedy, the second is more of a thinking movie. I'd have to say both are good, although you can't be offended too easily (especially when Richard Pryor is involved). Now I'm tired though so time to wrap this up.

So it looks like the fun problems with one of the servers seems to be something up with the RAID array. Not sure if it's the card or the array, but something's definitely wrong. Slow logins today, and a complete list of the files on the drive froze on me. We ended up going to lunch really late, which meant we were very hungry. That also meant that we got back with 15 minutes to the department meeting with even more food though. At least the day went quick after that. It was Nick's birthday today, so as he commented him and Dave came over to watch Two Towers Extended Edition. That thing is 222 minutes long. If you're not paying attention that's getting up pretty close to 4 hours. That was a good movie to try out my new screen with too. I realized partway in that I've had my sub off for who knows how long, but it hadn't really been noticable. It helps a bit on the physical impact on explosions though. Nick also bought us Famous Dave's for dinner (yea, we know that's backwards), so bonus points for him. Dave ended up ditching us partway through, but I guess we'll let him get away with it since it was a good reason. Anyways, 4 hours of movie watching makes me tired...

Getting up early is never fun. Started off the day by heading over to MGCC. Then a trip to Menards to exchange some fence which turned into a much more complex process then necessary. Even the security guy at the yard thought it was crazy. He had a wireless computer that was supposed to help them have less paperwork, but he still couldn't handle most of the process and the other people couldn't figure out what to do with the paperwork they did have or even where it was. Did a little computer work, and gathered more things to drag to my place, including new material for the screen. Now I just have to build the frame... My brother ended up coming over and watching the football game, which I heard didn't go well. I didn't pay much attention but they did have some decent music between things. Then just sat around a bit. I pulled the windows drive out of the pvr box and got it up and running. Rebuilding the cable index wasn't a very big hastle, although myth still needs to work on long provider name (there are 3 Roseville cable channel layouts and they look identical on screen since the end is chopped off). Finished off the day by watching Freeway. Rather interesting movie, although sorta weird. Reminds me a lot of American Psycho 2, but she's going for justice rather than just what she wants. Talked to JoeBuck a bit, hope his night turns out well...

Not much today. Slept in late which was nice. Got the mail and there was an Xcel bill. That prompted a trip to the attic to evaluate insulation. Definitely need more up there... My dad was over and looked at the furnace a bit, and replaced some of the dryer vent and we also replaced the washer hoses and cleaned off the mineral buildup from connections that were not properly tightened and leaked. Then I ended up watching 48 Hrs which is a semi-interesting although sorta slow movie. It was always a weird mix of happy and sad and probably would have been better if they had picked one and stuck with it - too much like a documentary or something. After that I watched The Big Lebowski. That's a weird movie, although is sorta like Office Space in it's true-to-life style. Lots of bad language, but otherwise pretty funny.

Nothing too interesting for the last couple days, thus the lack of updates. I made the most of my evenings by sitting around and doing absolutely nothing. Work was sorta routine, although the email server was being rather slow sorta randomly. Although that was fixed this morning. Of course after that was fixed the faculty file server started being slow and ended up needing hard resets twice. That turned out to be related to the drive filling up and it not denying the writes but trying to cache them. Maybe this will be enough to get faculty quotas in place, especially since their space usage has practically quadrupled in the last year. After work I went for a little tech shopping and bought a DVD-A and a couple SACDs as well as Finding Nemo. On my way home from that I stopped and got some hot cocoa and cayenne pepper (more on that later). Then the siblings came over and we watched The Recruit. Then we watched a few parts of Finding Nemo, which is an awesome movie on the technical side, and has some good humor too. Then they left and I started listening to SACDs and discovered that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon SACD is one of the best discs I've heard. The surround is mixed better than most movies, and the style of music can actually take advantage of it for more than ambiance without sounding stupid. Now back to the hot cocoa thing. Tenley posted something to ITS Board about hot cocoa being good for you because of anti-oxidants and stuff. This got Joe H and I talking about the history of hot cocoa and peppers today. So after a little searching on google we found some nice recipies that in the simplest form (as in not much different than standard hot cocoa) basically is a quarter teaspoon of cayenne pepper per two cups of cocoa. I mix up a batch and in the words of Crush, "DUDE!" It's gotta be the best tasting thing of cocoa I've ever had. A bit of a bite and a sorta undescribable aftertaste. Very slightly bitter yet sweet at the same time. So yea, you should try it sometime. I also read a rather funny obviously fictional diary on k5 tonight about outsourcing. Not gonna post a link for various reasons, but I think my favorite quote is "I'm sorry, I'm going to have to put you on hold. While I'm shooting the intruder, please re-install the printer driver." Anyways, should probably not screw up my sleeping schedule too much here.